With a local area steeped in history, local walks are often something that families enjoy with their loved ones in Salisbury, NC. Collins et al (2025) recently found that as little as five minutes of daily exercise can significantly boost how well a person processes thoughts and memories. However, these are not the only ways to get a specific health benefit from your activities.
Terrabella Salisbury’s Memory Care focus means that we want to ensure that anyone staying with us can improve and maintain their daily mindfulness and calm. Below, we explain how mindfulness games for adults, and diverse surroundings like landscaped gardens and walking paths, can lead to a noticeable improvement in someone’s cognition.
Read on to discover how community staff can guide each activity, helping your loved ones receive the support they need.
Mindfulness Games for Adults at TerraBella
In Terrabella Salisbury, we understand that seniors occasionally need key focuses to help them engage with concepts such as mindful play. As such, we offer several sensory cues in both our community’s outdoor and indoor environment, helping to give our residents something to ground on.
We therefore ask them to focus on:
- Birdsong
- Conversations of other residents
- The smells of garden blooms
- Brick textures
- The feeling of grass or a walking path under their feet
Each of these fosters grounded thinking. We tend to ask them to think about:
- Five visible features around them
- Four things they can touch
- Three items they can hear
- Two smells from inside or outside
- One thing they can taste, using food or drink if necessary
If community members are experiencing a negative thought process, this can often bring them back into the moment, freeing them from an anxious spiral. Our staff can guide them in each activity, ensuring they receive personalized support as needed.
Patterned Coloring Alongside Memory Care Efforts
At other times, we may provide pre-printed visual aids for our residents to use to create a visual display all of their own. Using supplied pencils or markers, our staff can assist them to draw within the lines to focus their mind on a dexterity and hand-eye-oriented activity.
Alongside the rest of our Memory Care efforts, this can help comfort those struggling for any reason. By displaying completed pieces in community areas or a resident’s apartment, they can foster encouragement from other community members or their family.
Mindful Play for Focus and Cognitive Wellness
Mindful play for adults, such as the above sensory games, helps to hone a person’s attention and memory. The games we encourage require minimal rules. However, these senior brain activities ensure that even those in their 80s and 90s can enjoy events and gatherings that boost their short-term recall.
The calming exercises for elderly residents can give your loved one the cognitive wellness tools they need to help with their own progress, even in private. Mace et al (2024) recently found that integrating mindfulness group activities with one’s lifestyle behavior could lead to an increase in people using Alzheimer’s risk reduction strategies in their daily life.
Memory Tray Recall With TerraBella Items
This game involves placing around ten familiar objects on a tray, allowing someone to look at it for around 30 seconds, and then covering the tray with a cloth. After this, prompt residents to try to list the objects. Depending on their capabilities, they can do this either verbally or on large sheets.
A twist on this is to ask residents to bring their own objects when doing this in a group setting, combining it with a form of “show and tell”, so long as there are limits on the size or complexity of the object to prevent it from getting complicated.
Calming Exercises for Senior Residents
Basic meditation techniques are akin to games for emotional balance and can offer new forms of emotional expression, reducing agitation. It is often a part of assisted living and memory care due to the major life change of moving into a senior living apartment.
The session does not need to last very long, and even fifteen minutes of focused calming exercises each day can offer a noticeable benefit to those in our care. As such, residents may take up these in their own time once they have practiced their use.
Mindful Breathing Circles
These are simple activities where the residents sit in a circle while one of the residents or a staff member guides them on a slow breathing activity. The cycle usually involves four seconds of inhalation, during which the leader counts them down, followed by a slower six-second exhale.
Those looking after the residents will help those involved by ensuring they have a comfortable posture, so that slower breathing remains comfortable. Encouraging the residents to communicate silently with nods or smiles can also promote group camaraderie.
Guided Imagery With Imagined Scenes
As a group, this involves asking residents to narrate a detailed scene. They can focus on any area they wish, whether a specific part of the scene or a single sense, to help push them towards a specific thought process.
Incorporating sensor anchors creates a more holistic experience. Asking seniors to press their fingertips together when they “see” or “touch” a detail in their mind creates a further experience with each step their imagination takes. If enjoyable, one can even record or write down some of these descriptions as part of memory care.
While these activities may seem to have no measurable outcome, science shows that they can still be crucial in boosting mental wellness. For example, Morán et al (2024) found that senior community members can engage with serious games to promote improvements, even after developing mild cognitive impairment.
Help Your Loved One Celebrate Their Calm With TerraBella
We ensure our residents are well looked after by helping them engage in mindfulness games for adults to boost their attention spans and reduce the possibility of anxiety. After only a few sessions, residents may see improvements, helping to welcome them into their lives within our Senior Living community.
Terrabella Senior Living community is ready to help your loved one and ensure their new routine is as comfortable as possible. We offer the best senior-focused care in the area at a fantastic value. So, schedule a tour and learn what else we can do for your family today.
